One of your very best friends is a moose?

"Moose" is the best euphemism for "Alaskan" I have yet to come across.....

I always liked this Sadowski post card, Yes I have been through Tok but not spent time there, it's lovely country...
now: (I got your euph right here buddy...)(grin)

Hey, Thal, do Alaskans really call raccoons "stripe bears"?

Darling, Our racoons don't have stripes, so we just call them... bears.

Still

Racoons are pesky, even if they are cute. And just not as clean a critter as you hear tell about. Not a toy.

Zactly.

AAAH! RAKINS!

Where I got "stripe bears" from.

Boog, this one's for you.

quote:

...I went over to the circle K and bought some gold paint and lunch sacks and redecorated the sinuses if you know what I mean. Straight on fume wizard shit man...

...I pissed a lot of dudes off from the press because I kept putting people in headlocks and screaming and I probably had a gold beard from puff n stuff time but my alpha male aggressions landed me some key interviews with the candidates...

...I remembered Ron Paul was a pussy doctor and I yelled "hey does being a ditch doc mean you got like a prima guide to chowing a sideways smile?" No answer so basically this fucker is evasive...

I laughed myself to tears on that one, lithos. Thanks!

Again....

quote:

originally posted by TwiliteMinotaur:

Never mind the fact that the longer that these parasitic entities which are secretly insolvent and which INEVITABLY must collapse like Goldman, JP Morgan...

Like I said. JP Morgan is insolvent, the soon-to-be-ripped-off by Jamie Dimon's impersonation of Jon Corzine times-ten just don't know it yet.

Queue the tailwagging reports of, "Regulators are hounding JP Morgan attempting to get to the bottom of this disaster..." "It's unclear at present what actually went on at (trading desk X in LONDON) and (grand-theft-fraud-o exec Y) said today that 'A lot went on at the firm, a lot of products were moved, it was a chaotic time and we're not sure where all the money is at present." Treasonous law breaking deserving of the letahlly injected wrath of some Texas governor will be spun as "technical violations" and "inefficient regulations."

President Barack Hope-n-change Obama will of course reward Dimon's implosion of the universe with an appointment to US Treasury Secretary.

This zombie bank has just severed at the torso and is crawling towards the Fed, hungry for more taxpayer cash to steal. Let's expediate the process: buy silver.

Note to hedge funds: sell JPM stock naked short like it's 1929; you can help kill the Frankenstein monster and make bank doing it!

So much for "the savior of the financial system." More like Anti-Christ.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

This may be wrong, but it certainly feels right, via Mr. Krugman.

The Macroeconomics of the Chinese Kleptocracy

quote:

Originally posted by Psychophant:
This may be wrong, but it certainly feels right, via Mr. Krugman.

The Macroeconomics of the Chinese Kleptocracy

It's right, in the sense that saying a burning twig in a forest fire is very hot and dangerous so we should go throw water on the twig, while intentionally failing to discuss the forest fire that it comes from.

But the people that pay Krugman's salary caused and are making bank on the fire, so there's that.

You know? This is all BS. Economies were invented as a tool of war. They were needed to pay soldiers of invading armies and keep them loyal and working for their owners. They might not have known it then, but they'd unleashed the most destructive and evil force the planet had known since religion. Both are nothing but weapons, and possibly also diseases. As long as we continue to tolerate their presence in our reality, we really shouldn't be surprised at the results of basing our social interactions on weapons of war. This laziness is disgusting. Where once humans lived of the sweat of their own brow, these assholes have hypnotized the world into thinking a weapon is food.

We fucking deserve extinction.

Completely unnecessary bullshit.

And we see how well it works by what's happening in Egypt today.

http://banktalk.org/2010/02/23...payday-loan-product/

When you take out one of these loans there should be a recording of the Stones' Under My Thumb playing in the bank lobby.

This is how, if somehow I became Earth Tyrant, charged with restructuring the world, I would tackle the current crisis.

First of all, I would like to point out that there is a real crisis, or several, and they will change our societies. On one hand, and it has been increasing lately, in the densely populated advanced countries (sparsely populated countries still have enough resources to keep the people employed) there are less jobs than people. One of the good points of the welfare state is that it employs a lot of people, with all kinds of qualifications. However it means those actually producing have to pay for all of that. The state therefore has been growing steadily, though there was a golden moment, when population growth stabilized or even became negative, where it could have worked. Now, with big immigrant influxes and increasing populations where the state has in many countries, due to mismanagement, corruption or simply production/welfare imbalances, become economically unsustainable. And it is difficult to lean the state when it just means unemployed people to support anyway.

The second problem, a more global one, lies in the reduction in resources as population and consumerism grows. I am an optimist, so I think we can solve the energy problem through technology, but that still means sharing a decreasing resource base with increasing people, as even if population stabilizes, people want more equality in the distribution.

The traditional solution, because similar resource crisis have arrived in the past, is to decrease population till we find a new balance point. War, Famine, Pestilence... Old companions of human society. Roughly what apocalyptical nuts have been waiting for, as that means you do not have to work to solve the problems, as "unstoppable historical forces" will do that for you. I like to compare the attitude of the Western and the Eastern Roman Empires. One tried to hold on, using all the old empire tricks, while the other changed the emphasis, changed the rules, became traders and power brokers, accepting (most of the time) they were an empire no more. One thousand years is the difference.

As I am not willing, even as global tyrant, to kill off thousands of millions of people, I need a different way. Which puts me in American Militia territory, as I will want to take away their weapons, their resources, and share them with poor Latin people. It just will take a bit longer than what they are expecting, as there are bigger fishes to fry.

They used to be the big evil a couple decades ago. But they took control of the media, and with the help of the War on Terror, they went back into obscurity. I am referring of course to the big multinational groups, and their specially evil sibling, the multinational financial corporation.

They are not evil in themselves, but when you combine compulsory greed with control of politicians things get nasty very quickly. Including a sharp decline in public income from this kind of companies, as they do accounting engineering, political freebies, and if all else fails, outright blackmail with the possibility of leaving. All of them very bad news for the estate financial stability.

Multinational groups are quite resilient if the target of a single government. You need to combine a strong block, representing a sizeable market, to make their own greed make them play by the rules, and then watch them to keep them from changing the rules. Just what certain groups should be doing, but they seem focused on other things.

Of course while the pressure mounts you need to clean up the political scene, both to reduce the corruption loss factor and to minimize the corporate interference in the government. That way, with the multinational companies playing by the same rules as the nationals, it may be even economically interesting to bring back some jobs, if only to spend some money and reduce the taxes on profits.

The increased income for the state would allow it to keep/retake control on those services that society needs to run at a loss, or that it cannot afford not to run, like energy, healthcare or public transportation. And create many unnecessary jobs for all those people that the "real economy" cannot employ because they are not needed. Then comes why I need to be tyrant of the whole world, because that way the rich will not be able to find a place willing to tax them almost nothing in exchange of their patronage. Alternately I am willing to consider considering corporations as people, and apply progressive income tax to them. Just making sure they fall in the 80% bracket.

Hard? Probably. Likely? Unfortunately no. But I do not see any other way that does not end with a lot of people dead.

Yep. People is gonna get dead, I reckin. No sunglasses-at-night cyberpunk antihero is going to being merged with Ray Kerzweil's wet-dream H+ AI named Helios, producing some benevolent sci-fi rendition of the Philosopher King, to implement the optimally egalitarian Resource Based Economy and serve as penultimate Judge Jury and Regulator, whilst speaking in philosophy babble effected with heavy FM and chorus vocal modulation, drawn with dated OpenGL graphics. There's no Deus Ex Machina around here to handwavium our Marxian job-production decoupling cataclysm events and Ayn Randian Illuminati plagues. No Hobbesian Leviathan, techno-utopian or otherwise is coming for us, other than the klepto-cabal variant who kill more people with one volley of their financial WMDs than the Sinaloa cartel could ever hope to slaughter with its assault rifles trafficked through HSBC/Wells Fargo. It's economic warfare time baby, bellum omnium contra omnes style. Lock and load.


Casualties

(Not counting the hundreds of thousands who've already died of starvation/succumbed to drug use/died due to gutted hospitals lacking basic meds like insulin, etc to pay for Goldman Sach's executives' yacht payments)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

Bring on the motherfuckin' bloodbath.
This is the reason I have used birth control religiously, for decades.
I KNEW there would come a time when starvation would be used as a weapon and motivation again.
I have known since I was a teen that the collapse was imminent.
I was not surprised on 9/11, only that it took so long.

Fuck it. The system is worthless. It can't last long enough to correct it's own course. The only alternative to all of us going down with the "ship of state" is outright mutiny. The US government will make a grab, eventually, for Saudi Arabia. Once all our troops are tied up killing brown people for oil, it will be a countdown.

There may not ever be a winner, but there will most definitely be blood.

I am ready to go, as I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.